How much shaking do you expect? Most modern Laptops will handle a light beating, even with the disk spinning. The disk should be powered, but idle when you don't mount it.
–
GantNov 20 '13 at 11:48

If the disk is idle (despite it is on) is shaking it will damage it?
–
SayyedAliNov 20 '13 at 11:51

Not more than it would be when turned on. You can still crash a head with the disk powered off. But as I mentioned, unless you are driving on very uneven surfaces or trip constantly when taking a walk, modern HDDs wouldn't mind.
–
GantNov 20 '13 at 11:54

I think you mean: not more than it would be when turned off. does it?
–
SayyedAliNov 22 '13 at 7:58

1 Answer
1

Here are the steps to take your hard disk to enter standby mode (or to sleep mode). This gets HDD to spin down and park the heads to landing zones so that the chances of a head crash is nullified.

Boot the Ubuntu liveCD/DVD/USB.

If the HDD that you're trying to take to standby mode has a swap-partition (likely if you have Ubuntu installed in your HDD as well), turn it off.

sudo swapoff -a (This turns off all devices marked as swap)

Now to make your HDD enter low power consumption standby mode:

sudo hdparm -y /dev/sdX where sdX is the target HDD, and X in sdX should be replaced appropriately (with a, b, c, ..., z); assuming it to be sda, the command would look like this: sudo hdparm -y /dev/sda

Or you could make your HDD enter the lowest power consumption sleep mode, causing it to shut down completely with:

PS. This method of putting a HDD to standby mode can prove helpful also when you want to be a little economical on power consumption. Especially in desktop computers, if you have more that one internal HDDs, you can power down those which you use very less than often.